Caribeño or mexicano, profesionista or albañil? Mexican listeners’ evaluations of /s/ aspiration and maintenance in Mexican and Puerto Rican voices

Authors

  • Whitney Chappell The University of Texas at San Antonio Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.34154

Keywords:

Caribbean Spanish, Mexican Spanish, /s/ reduction, aspiration, sociophonetics, sociophonetic perception

Abstract

Mexican Spanish is generally recognized as a conservative variety that maintains syllablefinal /s/, while Puerto Rican Spanish consistently weakens it. To explore what social properties are indexed by coda /s/ variants and whether these variants alone can alter evaluations of speaker origin, 75 Mexican listeners participated in a matched-guise test. They listened to recordings of five Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish speakers spliced to include only coda [s] or coda [h], evaluating speakers on a scale of social properties and identifying their perceived place of origin. Mixed effects models fitted to 6,750 evaluations demonstrate that [s] is associated with various measures of status, including intelligence, work ethic, confidence, and snobbishness. However, these evaluations are conditioned by listeners' stereotypes and regional expectations, as Mexicans were evaluated as speaking better Spanish when presented with [s] and Puerto Ricans as speaking better Spanish with [h]. Finally, listeners evaluated Puerto Rican voices as significantly more Mexican given coda [s] and Mexican voices as significantly more Caribbean given coda [h], with the most drastic shift for Mexican speakers. The paper concludes that manipulating a single salient variable (/s/) is sufficient to override other linguistic features, which play a much more limited role in social identification and evaluation.

Author Biography

  • Whitney Chappell, The University of Texas at San Antonio

    Whitney Chappell is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic linguistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, United States. She earned her doctorate from The Ohio State University, and her research focuses on sociophonetic variation in the Spanish-speaking world. Recent publications include articles in Language Variation and Change, Hispanic Studies Review, Estudios de Fonética Experimental, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, Spanish in Context, and Hispania, among many others. Her edited volume called Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception is in press with John Benjamins.

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Published

2019-05-02

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Chappell, W. (2019). Caribeño or mexicano, profesionista or albañil? Mexican listeners’ evaluations of /s/ aspiration and maintenance in Mexican and Puerto Rican voices. Sociolinguistic Studies, 12(3-4), 367-393. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.34154

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